Photos: Empty New York during the Coronavirus

In a city usually overrun with millions of people every day, seeing it completely empty is unusual. Just thinking about how this virus has muted the people involved in the flow of money, technology, art, food, advertising, it’s truly both appalling and somehow beautiful at the same time.

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LA State of Mind

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles. - Frank Lloyd Wright

Eclectic Architecture of LA

Los Angeles is a place of paradoxes. It's a place where you can list all the predictable cliches, yet many things have little or no continuity.

A man sleeping on the floor of the Hollywood Walk of Fame in front of the El Capitan Theater

The disturbing and beautiful are often one and the same. What you find so beautiful, attractive, and lust-worthy are also the exact things that are disgusting and disturbing.

Hollywood Sign Shadow

People and locales adjacent to each other are vastly different. Neighborhoods are disjointed in social class, interests, and architecture. There's no city center. LA exists as a pile of shard ends, not much different than the view through a kaleidoscope.

John Lautner: Chemosphere

Like a circus, oddities are abundant. Ridiculous stilted houses in the hills and large caricatures atop of restaurants have become a normal sight in contrast to things that are far stranger.

Randy's Donuts

It's a city of dreamers. So much so that it's natural for it to be a city of dreams that never come to fruition. It's a city that's constantly trying hard to restructure itself and at the same time, preserve itself.

Santa Monica Promenade

A hobo who is using the sidewalk curb as a pillow in front of a billion-dollar tech company. Celeb fetishes are force-fed. A woman who smiles at you in passing is the woman you see later that evening in a Netflix special.

Celebrities in front of Angel's Flight

Bradbury Building during Christmastime

It’s puzzling why people are so laid back here. There is so much to worry about. There is a real need for preparation and urgency. So many things to get in order. Everything from class inequality to the threats of mother nature. Somehow, people tend to be carefree.

Traffic in a tangled highway of noodles, often purposeless valet parking attendants on an empty parking lot, growing lines of people by which a restaurant's quality is judged, and potential motions in the fault line beneath that can erase it all.

To live here is like viewing a spinning carousel of snapshots. A fleeting glimpse of things that may or may not be there in the next go-around. The images are misleading. It's not that they lie. It's that they cannot tell the full story. They offer the joy of illusion, hiding about as much as they reveal.

Instagram - @mingomatic

Getting Old

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art. - Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

When I get old, will I have the passion and the drive in life that I do today?

Will I be looking ahead? Or will I be looking backward?

Will I have someone who loves me or even care about me?

Will I be more lonely or less?

Will I look at the world with positivity or negativity?

Will the world seem bigger or smaller?

Will I be able to hold onto my memories?

Will things be harder or easier?

Will I be able to keep positive as all the people I've known my whole life start dying around me?

Will someone young on the street look at me and think about what it's like to be as old as me?